This is not out in some rural town. This is in Portland, OR about 2 miles from downtown. Personal vehicles this large are simply incompatible with urban living and pressure their owners to continually break traffic law. Technically that Miata is parked as close to the stop sign as it can legally be, but as the Denali doesn’t fit in many places around here it’s owner is compelled to park across both the stop sign and the crosswalk.

Follow up: We had PBOT patrolling the neighborhood today for the first time ever. This block, specifically. I have to assume that one of you called them up and told them about this truck. Well guess what? A few dozen cars on this block got ticketed for things like parking contraflow, expired registrations, unapproved window tints, etc. Literally about half the cars on this street, yellow cards on every other windshield. You know who didn’t get a ticket? The big white Denali, which was parked about 5 feet behind the stop sign this morning. Too close by law, but apparently not close enough for PBOT to issue a citation. So to whatever fucking dumbass thought that cops are the solution, you didn’t improve our safety at all and you cost my safely-parked neighbors probably around $1000 in petty citations. I said multiple times in this thread that cops really aren’t the solution, even when they’re enforcing on your behalf they’re biased by culture. You didn’t help at all, in fact you arguably made the situation worse, and I hope you call you council members / PBOT office and request local restrictions on oversized vehicles or a road diet re-design of your street as penance.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    121·
    5 days ago

    It’s the exact same reason why Europe has better Labour Laws: decades ago the many fought to change the system so that they were not being constantly fucked up by the few.

    The cops are just a mechanism for applying said good laws that people fought for in the past.

    This is also why as many such laws have regressed in the last couple of decades, the utility of the cops for the general public regressed with them, and more and more what’s visible as the utility of the cops is the only kind of use of the powers of the state that has never wavered: the protection of the property and physical integrity of the wealthy and powerful.

    None of this is transport specific, though it definitely gets reflected in transport (partly in terms of traffic laws, their application and the size of the penalties when they are broken, but even more so in general transportation policies such as public transportation and even the very design of streets putting more importance on non-car transportation and less on car transportation, which is why, for example, sidewalks are more common in Europe) because of its outsized impact in quality of life.

    In fact I would say that the much broader availability of public transportation in Europe too is the product of the very same fights in the past to put the interest of the many above the interests of the few.